In what has become a yearly tradition, AMD’s has introduced rebranded cards for the OEM market. Say hello to the HD 8000-series OEM.

Last night, several websites began reporting that AMD had released the much-anticipated HD 8000-series into the OEM space and they were nothing but rebadged Northern Islands (HD 7000-series) parts. Derision, confusion, disappointment and a fair amount of soul searching followed but, in truth, gamers have very little to be concerned about.

The confusion this creates reminds me an awful lot of what I went through trying to wade through mobile GFX options. The naming conventions were all over the place, and just because one model had a higher number in a certain spot didn't guarantee that it was a better product

It's things like this that make me very cynical when it comes to marketing methodology.

This isn't new for AMD or nVidia. The Radeon X2300 was probably the more impactful of the renaming, because it rebranded a DX9 card to look like a DX10 card's name. As for nVidia, there's the good ol' 8800 series rebranded so many times over.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sswilson

The confusion this creates reminds me an awful lot of what I went through trying to wade through mobile GFX options.

I did the same thing looking at mobile CPUs - good thing I did because I found out the A8-4555M is vastly inferior to the A8-4500M. I just recently found that the mobile space has dual-core i7s floating around as well. I'm laptop shopping right now, and I ended up opening enough tabs to compare all the mobile bits that Firefox started compacting the tabs it on a 1080p monitor...

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